I enjoy look­ing at work spaces. Pic­tures of liv­ing spaces
(par­tic­u­lar­ly in archi­tec­tur­al mag­a­zines) usu­al­ly seem con­trived
and unin­hab­it­ed. Work spaces are more hon­est. Ansel Adams wrote,
“There are always two peo­ple in every pic­ture: the
pho­tog­ra­ph­er and the view­er.” But in these pic­tures, there
are three!

Despite 7.5 years of search­ing, Team Amer­i­ca still hasn’t
found the world’s top crim­i­nal. A recent paper by some UCLA
folks (“Find­ing
Osama bin Laden: An Appli­ca­tion of Bio­geo­graph­ic The­o­ries and
Satel­lite Imagery”) pro­pos­es a sim­ple but clever
GIS-based approach to map­ping the prob­a­bil­i­ty of Bin Laden’s
pres­ence. The paper depends on a lot of assump­tions but most of
them seem rea­son­able based on what lit­tle infor­ma­tion is known to
the pub­lic. Just ten years ago the spe­cial­ized data need­ed to solve
these prob­lems was exclu­sive­ly avail­able to the mil­i­tary, but
thanks to com­mer­cial satel­lite imagery and the Inter­net, acad­e­mia
can now do a pret­ty cred­i­ble job. I’m curi­ous what US
intel­li­gence thinks of all this. (And, I won­der, will they knock on
any of the three doors iden­ti­fied by the algo­rithm in Parachi­nar,
Pak­istan?)

I hate post­ing links, but I haven’t writ­ten in a while and
this is too beau­ti­ful not to pass along. For their 25th
anniver­sary, 4th Estate Pub­lish­ers com­mis­sioned a stop-motion film
that will make any bib­lio­phile smile. Check it out here.